A largely personal blog with much silliness, Tales of the Babe & Me and of Susan the Wonderchild, lots of cat photos, and other miscellaneous stories and observations.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Today in Boston...

Addendum, September 28, 2005: I've added pictures to this article and expanded the text greatly.

We had a wonderful time here today!

We got a late start, unfortunately, but it probably wasn't overly realistic to figure we'd get up at 7:00am local time and grab breakfast and get a cab into downtown, given that that would've been 4:00am body time and it was a Really Long Day yesterday getting here. So we actually slept until about 9:15. Fortunately, the hotel breakfast buffet was still going and I was able to grab food for us. It was totally uninspiring, but it stoked the fires and there was lots of protein in it and there was drinkable coffee that got our eyes open enough to head out the door.

The Hampton Inn we're staying at has an Enterprise Rent-a-car pick-up and delivery option. The Babe saw the sign for it and noticed something unusual about the pick up option (appearing in the second column of the picture below--look very closely at the first line under "Friendly and Professional Services" to see what's different). You don't normally get this kind of friendly and professional service in a three-star hotel, at least, not for free. She mentioned this to the desk clerk who blushed very red, but put the sign back down on the desk and didn't change it. It was still there a few days later when we left.

We picked up our Go Boston Cards (a package deal for goodies and tours and entrance and so on), then did a Freedom Trail walk with these nifty wireless audio packages. (A virtual walk of the Freedom Trail is available Freedom Trail.) It was very interesting and quite moving at times.

Prior to embarking on the trip, we took a side jaunt down to the other end of the Boston Commons. One of the things that choked me up was when we were walking by one graveyard at the end of the Boston Commons that had (among other people) Gilbert Stuart, the painter. There were a number of vaults there (an interesting phenomenon in themselves) and the names on most of them were eroded into illegibility. The Babe commented on this and I was very moved thinking of the saying "Men die, cattle die, and only the legends live on." That and Ozymandias, a poem that's always meant a lot to me.

There was a good deal of information at the start of the Freedom Trail about the Boston Commons itself, which was the meeting place for a lot of activities as well as the place of public punishment. The audio went on for a while about stocks and pillories and other Puritan entertainments. We walked across the Commons and up to the steps of the Massachusetts State House. Only rarely is the front door used--by the Governor and the President. Almost always, the side doors are used.

On the grounds of the Massachusetts State House is a statue of Mary Dyer, a Quaker martyr who was executed by the Puritans in 1660 for professing her beliefs. (So much for the idea that the Puritans believed in religious freedom for anyone but themselves.) Across the street from it is a monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first black regiment to be recruited in the North. (If this sounds familiar to you, it's because this was the story told in the Matthew Broderick film, Glory.)

We walked down the street and around the corner to the Granary Burying Ground. This is one of the oldest burying grounds in Boston. Like most of the burying grounds there, it was horribly overcrowded: at one point there were 11,000 infants and children buried in one section of it.

The tombstones were marked with fascinating variants of death's heads and winged skulls and so on. A lot of it looked rather primitive and the Babe pointed out that it reminded her of Mexican "El Dia de Muerte" stuff. I hadn't drawn that connection, myself, but she's right.

Samuel Adams of Revolutionary War fame is buried in the Granary Burying Ground. That there's a Samuel Adams Brewing Company is no coincidence, really: his father was a maltster. The company itself bears no particular connection to the historical figure, but someone clearly took advantage of their local history education and founded the company in honor of and to capitalize on the name of Samuel Adams. He was a great revolutionary and the beer made in his name is pretty good stuff, too.

Right next to Samuel Adams' grave marker is a grave marker for the Boston Massacre dead. Crispus Attucks, a black man who was a sailor and ropemaker, was the first man to die in the fight. It's likely that a mob was harassing the British soldiers until they fired on the crowd, killing five people.

I saw a gravestone I've known of for decades. It had the person's name and the date (I've a photo of this; I've got a zillion photos of all of this that I won't be able to upload until I get back), followed by the epitaph: "Remember, friend, as you pass by, as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you will be; prepare for death and follow me." (Morbid stuff, ain't it?)

Down the street is a very pretty building, the Tremont Temple, an old Baptist church founded in 1839 (the building in the photos dates from 1894). The pastor believes that the Tremont Temple is the first integrated church in America.

King's Chapel, the first Anglican Church in New England, was founded in 1686 by the Royal Governor of the Province of New England. In 1785, it became the first Unitarian Church in America. (Note: We kept bumping into Unitarian churches throughout our trip. It made us feel at home.) King's Chapel was also the first church in America to use an organ. I peered inside briefly; it was very attractive in a polished wood and stone way.

Still adjoining King's Chapel is the King's Chapel Cemetery. Boston was owned and operated by Puritans at this time and they refused to sell land to the Anglicans, so the church was built on a corner of Boston's first burial ground. The audio guide for the Freedom Trail said that there were so many people buried here that there were problems with decaying coffins, bits of bones sticking up, and even the occasional undecayed piece of body. I'll bet the place reeked of decay, too; it must've been very unpleasant. As with the Granary Burying Ground, there were a number of unusual tombstones.

There are a lot of famous people buried in the King's Chapel Cemetery, including William Dawes (Paul Revere's assistant who finished the famous midnight ride), Elizabeth Pain, who Nathaniel Hawthorne used as the model for Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter," Mary Chilton, the first woman to step off of the Mayflower ship, and a number of other people including John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Company. John Winthrop was largely responsible for the Puritan colonization. He felt that non-Puritans should be weeded out as the colonies should be for Christians only to carry the Gospel into the New World and to convert the gentiles therein. While by most accounts he was actually a decent man who did not seem to suffer from most of the faults of religious bigotry that the Puritans tended to suffer from, the Puritan colonization was largely his fault.

Around the corner from the King's Chapel is the site of the Boston Latin School, the first public school in America (1635), which Franklin attended. He was born a block away from here. This is also the site of the old Boston City Hall. There is a statue to Franklin here, unsurprisingly.

Across the street from this is what I'd swear is a reproduction of the Bridge of Sighs, a structure in Venice that led from the Doge's Palace to the Prison. It was so named because the sight of the harbor and sunlight was frequently the last that the prisoners being escorted were ever to see and they knew it. I haven't found anything further about it yet.

One other thing that choked me up was seeing the Old State House, notable for a lot of things but most impressive to me for being the place where the Declaration of Independence was first read to the public (from a second floor balcony). That was a powerful image for me.

We stopped about halfway through the walk, at Faneuil Hall. There was a lot more to see on the tour, but little of it interested us all that much and it was another 2 miles of walking. Moreover, we had to get back to the Visitor's Information Center we'd rented the wireless thingies from and return them by 4:00pm or they'd charge my credit card for them (ick!). We did spend a fair amount of time in the various markets at Faneuil Hall. We window-shopped and listened to a few very good street musicians.

At the marketplace, we saw a fun street performer: he was dressed as a Greek statue. If you gave him a donation, he'd give you a scroll. He'd stay motionless otherwise. It was very convincing. Good street theater adds a lot to a day out.

We got back to the VIC, handed them the audio units and the young woman said I didn't need to do anything else, then we scampered over to the point where we were to pick up the Beantown Trolley (another freebie on the Go Boston Cards). We had an interesting driver who told us a lot of things about Boston and Cambridge that were fun to know. An added benefit was that we got to bloody well sit down for a couple hours.

One of the highlights of the trip was driving by Trinity Church. When we return to Boston in the future, I'd like to see the inside of it.

We finished the tour and got off the trolley, had a surprisingly nice dinner at Bennigan's and wandered over to see Shear Madness, a very funny murder mystery play that the audience gets to take part in. It was a nice night out. We headed home to the hotel and, after looking at email and writing this on the computer, pulled our shoes off our tired feet and went to bed.

Tomorrow, we're going to get up early (no, really!) and go book a reservation on the Boston Duck Tours, a bunch of amphibious WWII landing craft that drive around the city and into the water as well to give you tours of Boston. We're also going to hit a museum, though whether it's going to be the Museum of Fine Art or the Peabody (I'm too tired to look up any more links; you do it yourself!), is still undetermined. There are also other excitements for us tomorrow such as riding on the swan boats (okay, that one I knew you wouldn't be able to find on your own).

Oh, and seeing as how it's September 11, I feel obliged to say this: every fundamentalist asshole who thinks they have a right tell the world that their imaginary friend is better than every other imaginary friend should go to the hell of their own choosing and stop trying to take us with them. The departure of fundamentalists from this planet would really make this a paradise. This applies to fundamentalists of EVERY religion. I'm disgusted by fundamentalist Muslims but fundamentalist Christians are even more obnoxious. If they want to kill each other in the name of their gods, I'm all for it--just do it quietly, don't leave craters, radiation, or toxic molds, and fucking leave the rest of us alone to enjoy their absence.

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About Me

I live in Fircrest, WA, married, 5 stepchildren who I'm mighty fond of, and 6 granddaughters who I extremely fond of. I write books, magazine articles, white papers, documentation, online help... most anything, even buttons for a button company. I've published about 8 million, which is quite a pile.

We have two cats, a 17yo tabby/Siamese mix and an 18-pound black cat who's fairly obnoxious.

The Babe and I play a lot of gin rummy together at restaurants and we bowl. All this may sound disgustingly humdrum, but I'm just giving you the few points of contact with a consensual normalcy amidst a backdrop of periodic chaos and excitement with travel, conferences, and cruises to exotic foreign shores.